Hands On Review: Samsung NX200 and 85mm f1.4

With today’s announcement of the Samsung NX200 digital camera, I can now officially say that I had some personal fondling time with the camera. While they’re not a name that you hear as often as those of Olympus, Panasonic Sony and Sony does Samsung seem to have a winner with the NX200? Especially with new lenses just announced too?

Ergonomics

The new Samsung NX200 isn’t a big camera. In fact, it’s fairly small but still feels very good in the hand. For clarity, it doesn’t feel heavy at all. Instead, it feels like a point and shoot.

Here’s the camera next to my Olympus EP2. As you can see, it has a sleeker and more modern styling with a more pronounced grip. It isn’t as tall nor as wide either. With the 16mm lens, it feels like something that you’d keep in your jacket pocket with no problem or sling around your torso with a leather case covering it.

The top of the camera is characterized by stereo microphones, a shutter control dial (that also zooms in and out when viewing images), the on/off switch, shutter release button, and mode dial. But looking at the dial, one can see that this camera isn’t totally targeted towards the professional but instead toward the enthusiasts.

Oh right, there’s also a hot shoe. It could be that this was a pre-production model, but that hot shoe was extremely tight. It was hard to get a flash out of it and into it.

You can let your mind wander with that one as much as you want.

The back of the camera is characterized by a dial similar in styling to the new Canon DSLR cameras. This also controls the aperture when in manual mode. There is an Fn button that activates the ifunctionalities, menu button, exposure compensation, play and delete. Oh, and there is a record video button.

For the record, this is not a touchscreen.

The Samsung reps emphasized that the 85mm f1.4 lens is very light. While it did indeed seem light compared to other 85mm f1.4 lenses, on the NX200 it seemed extremely front heavy. It was designed from an APS-C sensor, which lies at the heart of this camera. In fact, I hope that Samsung releases another camera that balances out the weight at least. With that said though, the image quality from the lens was absolutely fantastic. The high level of detail wide open and the colors were amazing.

Menus

The Samsung reps were quick to show us that there are three different types of menus on the Samsung NX200. First off, there are the normal menus that I didn’t play with too much.

Then there is this overlay, which would have been amazing with a touchscreen. However, it allows you to quickly access certain settings and change them accordingly.

And then there is the iFuncionality, which gives you loads of different effects or other options depending on which menu you’re set to. In the photo above, we’ve set it to render a fisheye style art filter.

Autofocus

The autofocus on the camera wasn’t the fastest, but it wasn’t slow either. In fact, it seemed a bit standard and only a tiny bit slower than the Sony NEX C3 and 5N. However, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.

Image Quality

Though we were not able to put a card in the camera, I was able to take a photo of the back of the camera after I shot this photo. I used the shutter dial on top of the camera to see the level of detail that I captured, and it was really quite amazing.

With that said, I hope that this new high resolution sensor doesn’t disappoint in the dynamic range, color depth and high ISOs. A full review will be coming when we get the review units.

We’d like to hear your thoughts though, let us know in the comments below.

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